Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchScuba Diving Physics: Fleuss's 1878 Rebreather to Trimix and Heliox
Episode 12508
In 1878 engineer Henry Fleuss built the first commercially practical closed-circuit rebreather: a rubber mask, a breathing bag, pure oxygen from a co…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Great White Sharks: 33 Years to Breed, Splash Fights, and Orca Threats
Episode 12507
In 1554 French physician Guillaume Rondelet labeled the great white Lamia, after a child-eating monster of Greek myth, centuries before Peter Benchle…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Giant Kelp Forests: Two Feet a Day, Urchin Barrens, and the Kelp Highway
Episode 12506
Kelp is not a plant. It is a brown macroalga in the kingdom Protista with no roots and no vascular plumbing: the holdfast only anchors it, the flexib…
3 days, 16 hours ago
HMS Dreadnought: From Armada Galleon to Nuclear Deterrent Submarine
Episode 12505
Dreadnought means fear nothing, and following the name through the Royal Navy traces 500 years of naval technology. The first was a 40-gun ship of 15…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Drunken Sailor: How a Whaling Work Chant Became Disco and Propaganda
Episode 12504
Roud Folk Song Index number 322, the shanty about what to do with a very inebriated sailor early in the morning, was built as a tool, not a song. Its…
3 days, 16 hours ago
The Compass: From Han Dynasty Lodestone Spoons to Gyro and GPS North
Episode 12503
The compass began as a fortune-telling device, not a navigation tool. Lodestone, naturally magnetized magnetite, fascinated the ancient Greeks, who c…
3 days, 16 hours ago
The Frigate's 400-Year Evolution: Dunkirk Raiders to Stealth Warships
Episode 12502
The word frigate traces back to a Greek phrase meaning undefended ship, and in the late 1500s Mediterranean it named a light, oared galley. During th…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Ellen MacArthur: 71 Days Solo Around the World on 20-Minute Naps
Episode 12501
Ellen MacArthur grew up in landlocked Derbyshire, England, born in 1976, and found sailing through books rather than a seafaring family. In 2001 she …
3 days, 16 hours ago
Suez Canal: Cleopatra's Dragged Fleet, Pharaohs, and the Ever Given
Episode 12500
In 31 BCE, with Octavian's forces closing in, Cleopatra had her ships dragged overland across the Suez isthmus toward the Red Sea, because the ancien…
3 days, 16 hours ago
Ghost Ships: The Mary Celeste, the Baychimo, and Dark Tanker Fleets
Episode 12499
The Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is built from the timber of a ghost ship. HMS Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic ice in 1854, and a year later…
3 days, 16 hours ago